Elon Musk’s Starship explodes in flight test, forcing airlines to divert

Washington: A SpaceX Starship rocket broke up in space minutes after launching from Texas, forcing airline flights over the Gulf of Mexico to alter course to avoid falling debris and setting back chief executive Elon Musk’s flagship rocket program.

SpaceX mission control lost contact with the newly upgraded Starship, carrying its first test payload of mock satellites but no crew, eight minutes after lift-off from its South Texas rocket facilities at 5.38pm (9.38am on Friday AEDT).

SpaceX’s mega rocket Starship launches for a test flight from Starbase in Boca Chica, Texas.Credit: AP

Video showed orange balls of light streaking across the sky over the Haitian capital of Port-au-Prince, leaving trails of smoke behind.

“We did lose all communications with the ship – that is essentially telling us we had an anomaly with the upper stage,” SpaceX communications manager Dan Huot said, confirming minutes later that the ship was lost.

The last time a Starship upper stage failed was in March last year, as it was re-entering Earth’s atmosphere over the Indian Ocean, but rarely has a SpaceX mishap caused widespread disruptions to air traffic.

At Miami International Airport, some flights were grounded. Dozens of commercial flights diverted to other airports or altered course to avoid potential debris, based on flight records from tracking website FlightRadar24.

The Federal Aviation Administration, which regulates private launch activities, said it had briefly slowed and diverted planes around the area where space debris was falling, but normal operations had since resumed.

The FAA regularly closes airspace for space launches and re-entries, but it can create a “debris response area” to prevent aircraft from entering if the space vehicle experiences an anomaly outside the originally closed zone.

Musk posted a video on X showing the debris field and said: “Success is uncertain, but entertainment is guaranteed!”

The failure came a day after Blue Origin, billionaire Amazon founder Jeff Bezos’ space company, successfully launched its giant New Glenn rocket into orbit for the first time.

The Starship upper stage, two metres taller than previous versions, was a “new generation ship with significant upgrades”, SpaceX said in a mission description before the test. It was due to make a controlled splashdown in the Indian Ocean roughly an hour after its launch.

The mission was SpaceX’s seventh Starship test since 2023 in Musk’s multibillion-dollar effort to build a rocket capable of ferrying humans and cargo to Mars, as well as deploying large batches of satellites into Earth’s orbit.

SpaceX’s test-to-failure development approach has previously included spectacular failures as the company pushes Starship prototypes to their engineering limits. Thursday’s test failure, though, occurred in a mission phase that SpaceX has flown through before.

The towering Super Heavy booster, meanwhile, returned to its launchpad roughly seven minutes after lift-off, as planned, slowing its descent from space by reigniting its Raptor engines as it hooked itself on giant mechanical arms fixed to a launch tower.

Reuters

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